As part of a series of seminars, the Kurdish Book Club is pleased to invite you to a seminar about a newly published book in English. The seminar, which will be held in Kurdish, will be chaired by Dr Rzgar Amin.Mem u Zin (Mem and Zin) of Ahmadi Khani is one of the important and well-known classical Kurdish literary texts, which has remained without a serious critical evaluation by the Kurdish experts or by foreign researchers.

According to Dr Mirawdeli, there has not even been a real definition of the work, which has wrongly been defined generally as a national epic. This, he thinks, is a tragic matter because Ahmadi Khani created his work as an attempt to establish his Kurdish people as a nation and facilitate the ground for them to appreciate and promote their language, culture and heritage. To try to fill in this gap, Dr Mitawdeli has accomplished in recent years a number of works addressing Khani’s Mem u Zin:

Rendering the text into standard middle Kurmanji, published in Sulemani, Kurdistan, 2009;

Re-writing the story of Mem u Zin as a modern drama by the name of ‘Shorshi Ishq’, ‘Revolution of Love’, 2012; and,

Compiling a scholarly study of Mem u Zin in English published as a book of over 600 pages.

In the seminar, Dr Mirawdeli addresses his work, his methodology and the conclusions of his study, which includes:

Critical review of the works published on Khani;

Khani’s definition of his work, his methodology and his theory of Kurdish nationalism; and,

Define the work as a drama, tragedy, according to Aristotle’s criteria of tragedy.

Khani’s definition of his work, his methodology and his theory of Kurdish nationalism; and,

Define the work as a drama, tragedy, according to Aristotle’s criteria of tragedy, explaining the four levels of meaning identified by Khani himslef: as a story, as a pretext for his philosophical ideas, as a literary innovation and as a national cultural institution.